Life & Wisdom Quote by Carrie P. Snow

Science, in Carrie P. Snow's framing, isn’t a cathedral of answers so much as a disciplined allergy to wishful thinking. “Refusal” is the spine of the line: it turns science from a toolbox into a posture, a practiced act of saying no to the comforting story you want to be true. The target isn’t hope as a feeling; it’s hope as a method. When hope becomes the evidence, belief becomes a kind of emotional bribery, and Snow is calling that bluff.

The quote works because it swaps the usual cultural script. We’re trained to treat hope as inherently virtuous, the moral garnish on any uncertain situation. Snow quietly flips that: hope can be a bias, a distortion field that makes us misread patterns, excuse weak data, or cling to a “promising” result long after it stops earning its keep. By casting science as refusal rather than discovery, she spotlights the part of scientific thinking people tend to omit when they romanticize it: the willingness to be disappointed, publicly, repeatedly.

There’s also a pointed social subtext. In an era when “I feel” and “I believe” get promoted to the status of proof, Snow draws a boundary between personal consolation and shared knowledge. Science, here, is communal accountability: you don’t get to keep a claim just because it’s uplifting. You keep it if it survives contact with reality, including realities that don’t care about your optimism.